If you’re adamantly opposed to torture, do NOT argue over its effectiveness! If you do, you’ve conceded the moral ground to your opponent, and are now arguing on HIS terms.
If HE can point to even a few instances where torture successfully got a bad guy to reveal valuable information, you’re sunk, and you CAN’T go back to arguing that it’s immoral.
Torture is wrong in and of itself. Stick to arguing that it’s evil, whether it produces results or not.
I agree completely and have made that point as well elsewhere.
Given that this is the SDMB though I saw this as an exercise on this particular point to explore the “effectiveness” angle and eschewing, for the moment, the moral side just to see where it takes us rather than a substantive debate on the question of whether we should torture or not.
Then the thread title is more than a little misleading. It should be “Torture is effective at extracting information in a given situation.” To use the term effective unqualified, and then to define it in a vacuum by excluding the negative consequences of such acts, is not really valuable.
Look who’s talking! You say torture works IF there’s corroborating evidence to fall back on and IF it’s practiced judiciously and IF you carefully set the stage with the prisoner and IF we combine it with other methods (that have proved more than adequate in the past on their own) and IF we somehow resolve all the other virtually-inevitable “practical issues” that are an inherent part of such an interrogation strategy.
Well guess what–if I have a car that runs IF I never go over 60 mph and IF I have to keep all the windows shut all the time and IF I remember never to have the lights and the wipers on simultaneously and IF I ignore the loud pervasive grinding noise coming from the back and IF I never have to put it in reverse, then I still have a car that runs, but it’s hardly what I’d call “effective” (beyond liberalizing that word’s definition beyond anything meaningful).
You have set so many preposterous conditions in your OP (and discounted so many significant, inconvenient variables) that your supposition to torture’s “effectiveness” becomes singularly fatuous in any real-world application.
To be fair, he is saying that absence of proof is not proof of absence, but be that as it may torture, while possibly effective in tactical terms, is counter-productive in strategic terms. As was pointed out in the Post article cited above, the fact that the U.S. was torturing prisoners created terrorists. If we drove 10d nails into Khalid Sheikh Mohammad’s testicles and he coughed up Osama bin Laden, I think it would be a pyrrhic victory.
Rob
First of all, this is contradictory. “What someone knows”, “where the safe houses are”, and “what the methodology is” are not specific facts?
Second, if you aren’t asking for specific facts, what useful information do you hope to glean from interrogation (let alone torture!)?
Interrogator: Tell us where your compatriots are!!! And I want amorphous, nebular vagueness!
Prisoner:…Somewhere in the Middle East.
Prisoner!
The main interrogator for the British during WWII when they were really in the shit still didn’t do it for practical reasons not because of his morals.
http://www.mi5.gov.uk/output/bad-nenndorf.html
These where people who were outside the rules, Geneva conventions and the Red cross
Obviously torture can be effective but the problem is you have no way of knowing what is accurate and what is not. Just because something effective in some cases doesn’t mean it should be used. Tyrants all through history have used easy effective ways of remaining in power. Democracy isn’t meant to be easy, it’s hard, it’s just fairer than the other ways of living.
That’s an expansive interpretation of what he said.
[I would also note BTW that according to this source, what this guy did was “not nice”, and it’s unclear on whether his definition of “torture” is the same as yours. In the current situation people seem to be saying that enforced nudity is “torture”, but I would tend to suspect that this type of thing would fit in with what this guy calls “not nice” or "aggressive.]
Same as above.
I outlined the basis of my opinion in the fifth paragraph of the OP.
Throughout this thread I’ve had a problem with people who either can’t be bothered or are unwilling to read what I’ve written with a minimum of attention.
I linked to this very study in the OP, fourth paragraph.
Right. The absence of proof is not proof of absence.
The effectiveness of torture is not something that lends itself to conclusive scientific studies.
I thought it was clear in context.
I disagree. It’s valuable to consider the matter independent of other aspects. Obviously you need to consider the whole picture before setting policy.
All these conditions seem reasonably achievable to me.
These seem like the same point.
Unless you are randomly grabbing people off the street and torturing them, there would have to be some facts that are known with reasonable certainty. If a prisoner is captured in a battle with the Taliban, for example, it’s a pretty good bet that he knows the identity of at least some higher ranking members of that organization. And if he confirms that by providing some details that can be verified, then you can use these to get a better sense of the reliability of the rest of the guy’s information, and also what other information the guy is likely to know (by understanding his role in the organization).
Or whether or not he really is a witch.
Similar to an earlier point, this guy said:
Is enforced nudity and putting insects in guy’s cells physical violence or “mental pressure”? I would tend to suspect the latter. (If not, what does count as mental pressure.)
More importantly, there are obviously any number of other interrogators who think it’s highly effective. As proof (of their belief, that is): they do it! They could all be wrong, of course. But pointing out that this interrogator or that one thinks it’s ineffective is ignoring the fact that a substantial number of other experts - the majority, ISTM - disagree with these people. (And this is even assuming that Stephens et al had experience with both methods.)
A guy tells you 72 items under interrogation. You can independently confirm 13 of them. 12 of the 13 are false, based on other information. Conclusion: this guy is generally lying about the rest too. 12 of the 13 are true. Conclusion: this guy is generally telling the truth about the rest as well.
Agreed.
You are accepting that the torturers said they got actionable information. But if they did not, they would have to admit they tortured people for no reason. That would be hard to face. Everyone involved in torture has a damn good reason to believe they accomplished something. If they did not ,would they admit it, even to themselves? They surely could not in public.
Why do you seem to have the view that gaining information is the only, or even the major purpose of torture? It wasn’t for the KGB before the show trials. It wasn’t for the Iraqis dealing with dissidents. Why would it be so now? People can believe that toture is ineffective in gaining information, but still support its use, pour encourager les autres, perhaps.
It is perfectly clear from the British using torture for decades in Northern Ireland against genuine IRA terrorists that:
So apart from being morally sick, torture also makes the situation worse.
Oh and:
But that’s the whole problem with torture. If you torture a guy, and he tells you his neighbor is also a terrorist, you grab up the neighbor. And because you have good reason to think the neighbor is a terrorist, you torture the neighbor. And hey, he confesses to being a terrorist! It’s like magic, how easy it is to capture terrorists by using torture!
I’ve also heard that an effective way to prevent car accidents is to outlaw cars. Effectiveness isn’t the only thing to take into account when weighing your options.
Oh come on, that would be a witch hunt. And we know for a fact that that could never happen, because everybody who is tortured is automatically guilty.
Re the witchcraft thing, I’ll clarify something in the (unlikely, IMHO) event that there is some genuine confusion about it.
I did not mean to suggest that anyone was a witch in the sense that they had supernatural powers. I meant that they engaged in behavior that they thought gave them supernatural powers, such that their confession was genuine if coerced. (There are probably voodoo witches all over Haiti now, and regardless of the efficacy of their powers, if one of them admitted sticking pins into dolls etc. it would not be a “false confession”.)
I don’t intend to address this further unless someone has anything substantive to say on the subject, which - based on comments to date - seems unlikely.
Sometimes it is, sometimes it’s not.
It doesn’t take a lot of brains to figure out that this may not be a good idea.
You can argue that virtually anything is ineffective by suggesting stupid ways in which it might be used.
Aaand we’re back to “torture works because we torture, if it didn’t work we wouldn’t torture, stands to reason”.
BTW, cite that a number of experts opine that torture works ? I mean actual interrogators, rather than fuckwits like Scalia et al. who have never set foot in an actual charnel ? You have been given many cites by interrogation professionals who disagreed with the fact that torture works. You have been given cites that the CIA people who performed the torture at the insistant request of the Bush administration themselves didn’t think it worked.
I’d like to see a real, pro-torture expert cite. Just one would be swell, TYVM.
Another question I’d like you to answer would be : if we are to assume torture does indeed produce incontrovertibly better results, why not use it across the board ? After all, terrorists are a very minor problem affecting America, objectively speaking. 9/11’s death toll was way, way under that of, say, one year’s worth of heroin ODs. Goat herders from across the world, plotting a bombing at a café terrace seem less important than judges and policemen taking bribes from the Mafia, gangs having turf wars in the downtown streets etc… etc…, not to mention a fair share of ticking bomb scenarios.
So why not advocate its use in US courts of law ? It would speed up the process tremendously. And we’d finally be 100% positively certain who the hell killed O.J.'s wife !
How is it an “expansive interpretation”? Are we speaking the same language? He quite clearly calls torture pointless and is clearly intimating it is pointless because it does not produce useful results.
As for your definition of what constitutes “torture” you are moving the goal posts. Someone may claim harsh language is torture. My parents yelling at me when I was a kid I deemed tortuous. For the purposes of this thread I’ll assume defined torture of which there is no doubt that it is torture. As it happens waterboarding has in the past been defined by the US as torture.
You made assertions with no foundation in facts. You assumed knowledge not in evidence nor necessarily obvious. Yes it is obvious torture has been used for ages. It is not obvious it is effective that people can be compelled in any meaningful way to refrain from doing X. The Romans tortured Christians to reject their faith. Worked well did it? Lots of examples like that throughout history.
That interrogators of the past thought it was effective does not mean it was effective. As noted at least as far back as Napoleon they recognized it is a poor means of obtaining intelligence and prohibited it. Further, today we have a much better understanding of psychology and studied techniques to get information via other means than torture that were unavailable to people of the past. Perhaps 1,000 years ago torture was the best they could manage for any kind of intelligence from prisoners. However, being marginally better than nothing does not make it effective and had someone tried other methods then they may have found surer and less violent means to get the info they wanted. That it was used a thousand years ago is no argument for using it today.
Yeah…you “scanned” a near 400 page document and concluded, “they don’t go further than saying that there is no legitimate evidence - in the form of scientific studies and the like - that supports the effectiveness of torture.”
Well great…yet you are making that very claim. In the face of numerous experts and studies that say such a claim is wholly unfounded.
I’ll note again you have yet to provide a single piece of supporting evidence for the OP.
You are being so circular here. It’s you making the argument that some people must think torture is effective (at gaining information) because they do it. My argument is the prevalence of torture has nothing necessarily to do with whether the torturer thinks it gains credible information. There are many other reasons they might be torturing the person. They might be sadistic, or serving a sadistic regime; they might want to inform religious extremists that while they might think they are on a fast track to heaven, that journey will be a monstrously painful one; they might be seeking revenge for friends and colleagues beheaded on video; they might simply be trying to punish the individual.
The fact that people torture does not mean, whatever you say, that those people necessarily believe it is effective in extracting information. And it is highly unlikely said people will come out in public and say “Yes, I tortured him because it gave me a boner/the fucker deserved it/it’ll teach all these A-rabs what happens if they oppose the U.S. of A.”